> I would state that even by your definition of high level, they are being both pretty much succesful.

C++ certainly had a high market share in the application space in the early nineties, which it has since lost. The market share of low level languages in the application space overall has dropped by a lot since then and is showing not even a hint in reversal of the trend.

> Likewise Rust being adopted by Linux kernel, Microsoft (now the official language for Azure infrastructure, with C and C++ requiring clearance for new projects), Google on Android and Chrome/V8, it is also quite successful for low level coding, alongside the whole GCC/LLVM infrastructure, written in C++.

I am not doubting that a language that follows C++'s design philosophy may ultimately take a large market share from C++ or from C (although if Rust is the language to do that, its rate of adoption is alarmingly low, but that's beside the point). My point is that, despite trying, all such languages combined have not shown any success in taking a significant market share from high-level languages in the application space. Surely if the problem wasn't the philosophy but the execution, and if Rust is the language that successfully cracked the code for low-level/application convergence, we should have seen some significant change in trend over the past decade, but it's just not there. At some point, hypotheses regarding utility and value need to become very visible in the market -- which cannot be completely irrational given economic pressure and competition -- and you can try to find a trend in noisy volatility only for so long. If C++'s 40 years and Rust's 10 have failed to to prove the hypothesis that low level languages can grab a large share of the application space, maybe we can wait another 20 years and see. But I'm saying that right now there doesn't seem to be any market movement supporting that hypothesis even though I think we're long overdue to see some if the hypothesis held, and so speculation on the future success of the approach is not justified by what we see in the market.

My hypothesis for the preponderance of such speculation in forums such as HN is that commenters in such forums (as well as people writing OSes at Google) are not sufficiently aware of the software landscape overall (which is mostly growing in the "low skill" area, let's call it), of which they're making up a dropping proportion. There are 50 new Python developers for every new C++/Rust developer, and if you think you can convert a large portion of them then you haven't met them.

That's why I think that low level languages that try to accommodate application programming are misguided if they think this will help convert a significant portion of application programmers in a market that's overall becoming less skilled, not more (I think this approach harms their adoption rather than helps it). I believe that the low-level/application convergence a lost cause, but even if it isn't, then Rust certainly isn't the language to have cracked this problem. I would say that the only hope for "high skill" languages to increase their share is if the "low skill" segment is reduced by AI, which may well happen, but that's a very speculative bet.